Game Company Beats Domain Squatter Today; Should Prepare For More Tomorrow

from the squatter's-paradise dept

When ICANN was in the process of reviewing the application for the new .xxx top-level domain, we were always wary about the idea. We reported that this was nothing but an extortion racket on businesses to force them to buy an expensive and unnecessary TLD for their trademark, for little else but to avoid being associated with porn. That prediction was dead on, as we saw universities rushed to buy up the .xxx versions of their .edu domains.

Then ICANN approved a new plan to allow even more unneeded and unwanted TLDs. Once the bidding process was in motion, we highlighted the sheer number of TLDs that were proposed. While many of these were directly related to certain companies, many were generic TLDs that any website owner might conceivably use. However, just as there are big problems with the .xxx TLD, we will see similar situations here. Companies will be forced to buy up domains in the fear that someone will use their trademarks for potentially nefarious purposes.

All this concern is based not on speculation but on reality, as one game developer Riot Games, the maker of the popular League of Legends game, has learned. Riot Games had recently won a dispute over a a domain squatter that was banking on people mistyping the League of Legends domain. This one was a fairly simple use of one of the current TLDs on the market: .co. The owner of the .co domain had set up the domain to show porn for anyone who mistakenly typed the wrong TLD. This activity is pretty much as old as the internet itself.

While Riot Games was able to win this one, it seems that we're going to be hearing a lot more stories of these kinds of fights once ICANN officially approves the new TLDs and they begin rolling out. The idea that companies are now going to have to keep checking and buying up their domains on all of these variations seems particularly ridiculous. Not only will it be time consuming and a waste of money, but it's unclear that there will be any value at all to these new domains.

The .co extension was a very poorly thought out idea, one that ICANN should never have approved. Basically, it's a great typo or confusion extension, because people may forget the M or my not notice the lack of an M in the address of a site, especially inside pages.

This is one of those tlds that should never have been approved. It is proof that ICANN is about as greedy as everyone else, I guess.

I'd call it "patently" ridiculous, but then this is a different aspect of law than patents, so the pun doesn't quite work. Darn.

Also, I'm sure that these companies could find some use for these .xxx sites. Perhaps they could host the inevitable porn parodies that always seem to spring up around any property, and thereby direct people to the original work?

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Oh god almighty...

....This article brings me back a fare few years ago. A freind of mine found a porn site looking up information about the White House. He used the TLD ".com" instead of ".gov". Yeah, explain that to the female computer lab teacher on duty....8th grade methinks ^_^

In my view the only TLDs that should exist are country (ie: .ch .br .nl etc) and very limited others such as .gov, .org and .com (and maybe .info for personal sites). Porn fits perfectly in the .com or .info categories. In the end all this does is make companies spend more money on useless stuff and provide a lot of space for scammers, phishing attacks and so on.

The era of typing full domain names manually is over

I've noticed lately that I almost never type out a full domain name manually. Instead, I will either:
1. Start typing the domain, then choose the actual site from Firefox's internal history search
2. Follow a link
3. Do a Google search for the company name

The only case where I even consider typing out the full URL is if I got it from an offline source, and even there I'm more likely to use a search for the core name rather than typing out the whole thing.

Phones are also getting to the point where they can read a URL through the camera, without the assistance of a QR code.

On top of that, we can add the fact that for many "web applications" the tool we actually use to access it is a dedicated smartphone utility - the namespace is the name in the relevant app store, not the DNS host of the site itself.

All ICANN is doing is hastening the conversion of DNS from a scheme that is a visible part of the main UI of the internet, to an abstraction layer over IP addresses that is used as a hint by search engines and a stable record for consumption by other software (such as other web services, client applications, browser history recording and automatic URL recognition tools)

Legislation has to pass preventing extortion on trademark owners when it comes to TLDs. Especially with .XXX. Pornographers cannot be allowed to charge regular business owners hundreds of dollars (for just one name!) to block their company "or else". How has this even been able to continue?? Why is ICANN continuing to operate unchecked? Enough is enough with this garbage. Its time for congress to get involved already!

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Seriously, you want Congress to get involved? Have you been reading this site lately? If Congress gets involved we'll have enough TLDs to have 'complete sentence' URLs instead of today's 'short phrase' URLs. It would be like Christmas for them.

Mistranslations

One thing of note I just realized is that many webmail applications automatically translate yyyy.xx or yyyy.xxx to domain names based on ICANN country/TLD codes. With so many new codes coming online, you have a real potential for abuse, mistake, or just really crappy e-mails.

For instance a friend just wrote me:I should.be there at 445.

She mistakenly put the period in there, but gmail translated that to a valid domain. That domain might be malicious, or any number of issues remain. This will only increase as new top-level domains are added.